[PLUG] Busted computer

Russell Senior russell at personaltelco.net
Thu Oct 18 11:40:29 UTC 2007


>>>>> "Russell" == Russell Senior <russell at personaltelco.net> writes:

John> I saw your note this morning, but have been too busy all day to
John> try it. I just did and it didn't work. I still get the kernel
John> panic:

Russell> That sort of sounds like the initrd (a kind of compressed
Russell> image that becomes a ramdisk to help loading device drivers
Russell> necessary for booting up) may be damaged or missing.

I decided to figure out about initrd's a little bit, having managed to
remain mostly ignorant of them 'til now.  According to the mkinitramfs
manpage, an "initramfs [or initrd] is a gzipped cpio archive".  To see
the contents of a particular initrd, you ought to be able to get a
listing with this command, e.g.:

  zcat /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-2-686 | cpio -i --list -v | less

substituting your own initrd filename.  Or, actually extract it into a
temporary directory, say:

  mkdir /tmp/my-initrd
  cd /tmp/my-initrd
  
  zcat /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-2-686 | cpio -i -v 

and see if it blows chunks in interesting ways.  If it extracts
cleanly, then I guess it isn't corrupt.  In which case, look at the
init you find there.  It's a shell script and fairly linear.  It might
shed some clues.


-- 
Russell Senior, Secretary
russell at personaltelco.net



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